February 02, 2017

Raid In Yemen

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.

As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

So now Trump is expected to weigh in on the appropriate level of ground support?!? And maybe eyeball some satellite photos? As Allahpundit notes. General Mattis, now SecDef, has some experience here. Gen. Dunford, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Advisor Flynn, formerly a Lt. General who oversaw raids like this for a living, were also in the final meeting. Please.

IMHO the Commander in Chief approves these missions, or rejects them, based on the possible rewards and any risks associated with the country in question (Yemen, here), other allies, and US and world opinion. If the Defense Department submitted a half-baked plan after months of effort, well, that's on them. More reasonably, these are dangerous missions and sometimes things happen. E.g., the last known raid in Yemen, Dec 2014, failed to rescue the targeted hostages:

US special forces soldier is killed in Isis hostage rescue mission in Iraq

Almost done. Back to AllahP:

What’s missing from any of the reporting is the suggestion that Defense warned the Trump White House that they weren’t ready to roll but the White House demanded action anyway. Until that evidence is produced, why should we assume that Trump is the negligent party?

OK, into the Bonus Round for outrageous reporting. Here is the Guardian, picked up by The Week:

Saturday's Navy SEAL raid in Yemen — which resulted in the death of an 8-year-old American girl and a U.S. naval officer — had previously been rejected by former President Barack Obama, The Guardian reports. President Trump approved of the raid in his first military strike as commander-in-chief:

[Colonel John] Thomas said he did not know why the prior administration did not authorize the operation, but said the Obama administration had effectively exercised a "pocket veto" over it.

A former official said the operation had been reviewed several times, but the underlying intelligence was not judged strong enough to justify the risks, and the case was left to the incoming Trump administration to make its own judgment. [The Guardian]

The raid was greenlit by President Donald Trump shortly after taking the oath of office, but multiple officials told CNN the mission had been planned months in advance and had been briefed to then-President Barack Obama.

Both defense and Obama administration officials said the operation was never vetoed by Obama and that "operational reasons" were why it was pushed back after January 20 and why Obama left the task of authorizing the raid to his successor.

People want to believe and the media wants to give their customers what they want. Unexpectedly reality-based reporting from the NY Times on this.

WHAT TIPPED THE BAD GUYS? Why did our troops lose the element of surprise after arriving by helicopter five miles away? Speculation in the Times:

In this case, the assault force of several dozen commandos, which also included elite soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, was jinxed from the start. Qaeda fighters were somehow tipped off to the stealthy advance toward the village — perhaps by the whine of American drones that local tribal leaders said were flying lower and louder than usual.

Through a communications intercept, the commandos knew that the mission had been somehow compromised, but pressed on toward their target roughly five miles from where they had been flown into the area. “They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning,” one former SEAL Team 6 official said.

Too many eyes in the sky making too much noise? Plausible? Surely we have done this lots of times.

The math here is above my pay grade, but what I take from it is this: the left is a cultish faith that dresses itself up in a phoney veneer of intellectualism that regular working stiffs dont have the time or inclination to effectively challenge. Here, the veneer is applied in the realm of social sciences to 'prove' that racial and ethnic diversity is betterer. However, the same basic approach is loudly on display in the utterly bankrupt legal (and propaganda) challenge to the EO.

It's worse than "intellectualism". They attempt to claim their sociopolitical view is just as true as gravity.

Hong and Page’s paper has been used to give a scientific veneer to the diversity field, as it is one of the few research papers that appears to rely on more than qualitative information for its conclusions. Page comments on Theorem 1 in his book The Difference [3] (p. 162),

"This theorem is no mere metaphor or cute empirical anecdote that may or may not be true ten years from now. It is a mathematical truth."

This is just wrong. The claim that diversity trumps ability has been given no foundation by Hong and Page’s paper.

"This theorem is no mere metaphor or cute empirical anecdote that may or may not be true ten years from now. It is a mathematical truth."

This is so hilarious and perhaps an unfortunate side effect of giving those social science chimps even a veneer of respectability instead of calling them social guessers or social dart throwers; although it's hard to grant tenure in the old folks' home with those titles. That's why you had that lunatic crone getting tossed off the plane who thinks that global warming is as real as gravity; something she believes as much as that wheezing fool, Garrison Keeler, is funny. It's also illustrated by Herr Krugman, who has never been right about anything, developing his "multipliers" to the 80th decimal place instead of just saying "something's gonna happen".

absolutely agree. "Page’s work on diversity has
been cited by NASA [4], the US Geological Survey
[5], and Lawrence Berkeley Labs [6], among many
others."
it's little wonder that everything seems to be so fubar, isn't it?

Hey Kev! I see no purpose whatsoever with debating someone who is dishonest, mentally ill or unwilling to engage in a meaningful exchange. The LEFT is WAY WAY WAY out of control. The END-GAME will not be pretty. The LIBTARDS are unhinged, and the DEMOCRAT PARTY and MEDIA are egging them on.
I will not chat amiably with a troll, whose goal is to f(redacted) our country, because THEY LOST.

As usual, Clarice's Pieces is Spot on.
Clarice, the MFM are quite simply FECES FLINGING Monkeys. The MFM is/are, lying hacks, who have been BIASED from cradle. These losers have had free reign to lie and to frame the NEWS from their LYING/HACK/BIASED viewpoint. The PARTICIPATION TROPHY losers CANNOT ACCEPT, what has happened.

Have I grumbled here before about Thomas Karl's infamous global warming pause busting paper? It's in the news, with an NOAA whistleblower, of high status, now retired, of course. It's in the Daily Mail, at wattsupwiththat.com and at judithcurry.com

The nut job judge lefties claim was chosen by Bush.http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/02/a-strange-ruling-from-a-strange-judge.php
To cover up the embarrassing weakness of Judge Robart’s temporary restraining order, reporters at the Washington Post and elsewhere have trumpeted the fact that Robart was nominally appointed by President George W. Bush. They have done this to suggest that his ruling must have merit, because otherwise he would not have ruled against a President of the same party as the man who appointed him.

But this is misleading, since Robart is a staunchly liberal judge whose appointment was effectively forced on Bush by liberal Senator Patty Murray in 2004, when Washington State had two liberal Senators.
...
Judge Robart. . .is the same guy who issued [a] bizarre college sexual assault ruling. . .He ruled a falsely-accused male student could not depose or obtain relevant documents from the female student who got him expelled because that would traumatize her (never mind that it was SHE who performed a sex act on him when he was blacked out, meaning that if anyone was guilty of sexual assault it was HER). Reason’s article about it can be found here.

Robart also bellowed “Black Lives Matter” in open court, as the Daily Caller noted (in a context in which it made little sense).

"Apparently the Wheaton College president is willing to risk student safety for virtue signaling."

If the leftists can find judges in Washington State that don't care about the safety of American citizens and their appeals court are willing to stand up and say they don't care anything about the safety of American citizens;the President of some college is probably not in much danger of being called out for being against America, IMO.

Legal abomination is what Jacobsen calls this. It reminds me of how much now I see references to the law as a human social sciences that, like education, can be used to force people to believe what someone wants them to believe.

Of course the the judge's ruling is crazy. But although the storm and fury of the prog foot soldiers is random and crazy, perhaps the choice of this as an issue is not.

I think the likely intention of this travel ban is to get started on immigration control by going after low hanging fruit.
I bet this was supposed to be a nothing burger.
Trump didn't start with DREAMers.
He didn't start with millions of illegal hotel maids and landscapers.
That would be divisive and controversial.
He started with a pause in travel for NON citizens. From a handful of countries. Off a list created by former President Obama. For a limited time.

Yet Dems went ape siht. Alarms went out to the media. Twitter and Facebook storms were launched. Silicon Valley tech employers mobilized. Taxi strike and airport demonstrations materialized out of thin air.

Several conservative writers say the biggest fight in Cabinet confirmations is for Education. Because it affects teacher unions, a core Dem constituency.
The virulent reaction over this minor travel ban suggests another core Dem voting group has been impacted. Perhaps Dems (correctly) identified this as an opening salvo in the fight over illegals and immediately dialed it up to eleven.

The 'so-called' does not really refer to the judge as a noun. It refers to judge as a verb, applying the law and showing how it is being applied as the Boston judge did. He is so-called because when judges disregard the law they may be a judge factually while failing to act as a judge.

This is the law. These are the facts. "This is not who we are" is not judging. It's empty rhetoric which is what the order was.

However, an alternative is that the protests are being funded by someone who wants to bring the country down. I offer as evidence that sharia-supporting Muslim woman who was one of the featured speakers at the women's march, the 3 Pakistani's who were reading the House intelligence committee files, the story from CBS this morning that the Statue of Liberty was originally a Muslim woman, and Obama's insistence that we bring in more Muslim refugees.

There seems to be a pattern here of undermining American values, compromising national security, and flooding the zone with likely troublemakers, all while being told that we are bigots if we don't go along with this.

You are right that this should have been a nothing-burger. It wasn't, and the question is why. I would suggest that the hysteria overthis is being pushed by those who want no pause in brining in people from these countries, and one has to wonder why. I also am alarmed by the increase in Muslims arrested along the southern border, by the way.

In light of Clarice's great "Pieces," it's interesting to see how the climate stuff in the 8:26am link was covered in the MSM. The dubious claim of 'no pause' was of course reported in the WaPo. There's a rather cautious piece by the WSJ suggesting that the margin of error in the statistics is often ignored, and now only the Daily Mail seems to be reporting on the manipulation:

Great "Pieces" clarice.
It will be overturned tomorrow and security will reign.
Keep track of every name and every immigrant who has entered in the last 72 hours.
Monday DeVos and Sessions will be put in place.
Call out Dems by name as obstructionist and keep count of which ones voted against President Trump's cabinet choices.
Start running ads depicting their pro Muslim anti -American stances.
I want all visas checked for expiration dates.
If expired, set court date after detention of visa violated.
Enquire as to why he/ she overstayed their rightful time and who do they think they are to flaunt our laws.

by the pseudonymous Publius Decius Mus. "Who is this "Mus who roars?"" many asked.

Turns out that Mus is in actuality a gent named Michael Anton, who has recently been appointed as the senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council (a post originally offered to Monica Crowley).

In searching for information about Anton, I came across this this piece from the CRB, from 20 June 2012, entitled:

The release last fall, after 44 years, of the Beach Boys' abandoned masterpiece Smile is a milestone of American popular culture. Rolling Stone has called it "the most famous unfinished album in rock & roll history." But Smile is also something much bigger. It is the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California. It was a paradise for the common man, one that produced legions of loyal and productive citizens, developed the modern aerospace industry, helped the West win the Cold War, and exported an attractive and fundamentally decent (if often vapid) vision of American life to every corner of the globe.

That dimwit that VDH responds to gets the Swiftboat story 100% wrong; the fake news was the MFM saying the Swiftboaters were "debunked" when in fact that never happened. They were there and knew what happened; the MFM just put their fingers in their ears and said "don't say bad things about our lanterned jaw hero".

er, 'flout', maryrose. Caught the teacher did I? I particularly love the very few moments when both 'flout' and 'flaunt' can be used interchangeably without changing the meaning, and the more common ones where either can be used but with different meanings.

Since our Special Forces have never really worked very well with indigenous muslim populations, HOW this raid went south is almost a "gimme"!
Their loyalties are to the ummah and other muslims, their stupid rule book states that as clearly the shit stains up their left sleeves and the stampeding of donkeys and goats every time a muslim male drops his zipper within 500 yards of a herd! That's why they wear dresses, goats and donkeys can hear a zipper drop miles out...in the future, EXCLUDE the locals!